In the garden again

*heavenly sigh*

I got to play outside again today, and Buddy was right alongside me. I tilled the deep compost/litter in the chickens' pen, cleared out the spots that weren't composting properly, and made a traditional compost pile to mop up the mess. So far, the deep litter system seems to work well for us (i.e. chickens essentially live on the compost pile and you just keep adding new straw on top of your scraps and their droppings). Things I have learned about this:

• Banana peels and corn cobs take FOREVER to decompose, but everything else is unrecognizable after a week or so. That's wicked fast.

• Two "trouble spots" turned up where it was too wet too often (near the waterer) and where I compact it by stepping on it to gather eggs and deliver food/water. The water problem is easy to fix by changing where the waterer resides and being careful not dump the dirty water in the same place every time. The compaction is a more difficult problem. Outside of the soggy spot and the hard spot, the chickens have managed to keep the whole mess well-stirred. I dug in and found oodles of fat earthworms swimming around in there, which certainly motivates the chickens to keep scratching deep. 

• The chickens eat a whole lot of our food scraps over time. I threw two whole heads of half moldy broccoli in the pen this week (grrrrr, so mad at myself!). The chickens didn't even bother to look at the broccoli when I first threw it in there (they like breads, eggshells, rice, and noodles best), but two days later, I could see they had pecked off every bud on both heads. The day after that, only the toughest parts of the broccoli stems were left. They had pecked two heads of broccoli to death. All that green, brassica goodness is now in their eggs. Wahoo! So, the chickens work through the kitchen scraps and stir up the rest, making the microbial process go much faster. What's NOT to love about this system?!

Then Buddy and I cleared around the fruit trees and fertilized them a bit. Buddy is odd around insects and worms. He likes them and points them out to me but doesn't want to be too close. And he certainly won't touch them. But if I put the worm in a cup, Buddy will happily run that cup over to the chickens to give them a treat.

I've spoiled Roo. Every time I stoop down to dig in the soil, she sneaks away from the other girls and kinda hangs out by me. I point out bugs and worms for her to eat, sometimes offering them on my hand. She and the other girls have great eyesight, by the way. They can scratch in the mulch and find nematodes to eat. NEMATODES! Crazy. As much as I love to see them eating nematodes and slugs from my garden paths, I don't like how they fling my mulch everywhere. Gotta find a better solution for that.

I still haven't decided how to proceed with garden projects this season. I won't be buying any new seeds, that's for sure. I'm still tinkering with my garden bed frames. Pictures to come :) I would like to get the brambles situated, but that's a big, heavy-lifting, serious digging, and building kind of project. I trust my soil work, but I don't know if I could build a strong enough trellis. Does anyone out there want to show me how to work with concrete? The trellis is essentially a modified fence. Then there's the grape arbor...way too much building involved for my comfort. More concrete. I'll need to do a lot more research before being comfortable with that project. Yay!